A Monmouth County engineering firm criminally charged with hiding political contributions while making millions of dollars off government contracts in North Jersey and elsewhere filed for bankruptcy protection in federal court on Friday.

The firm, Birdsall Services Group of Eatontown, asked a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge to allow it to continue to pay its 325 employees by using assets that a state judge ordered frozen earlier in the week. It made the request in court papers filed in federal court in Newark to support a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Birdsall’s chief operating officer, John L. Wuestneck, wrote in court papers that the state had frozen the company’s $41 million in assets, and asked a judge to release those funds. Without access to that money, he said, the company is unable to pay its creditors or meet its bi-weekly payroll of close to $1 million.

He said all but two of the seven executives named in state grand jury indictments earlier this week are no longer with the company. The two who remain, Scott McFadden and James Johnston, “are either on administrative leave without pay or will be resigning,” he wrote.

“The seizure of assets … has caused the Debtors [Birdsall] serious damage by depriving them of their abilities to pay their creditors in the ordinary course,” Wuestneck wrote in court papers. “The Debtors also are unable to fulfill their payroll obligations.”

He argued that the company would be forced to cease operations and would lose employees if its assets remain frozen, and would not be able to emerge from bankruptcy.

Officials in the office of state Attorney General Jeffrey S. Chiesa could not be reached for comment on Friday evening.

Earlier in the week, a state grand jury indicted Birdsall and its recently retired chief operating officer, Howard C. Birdsall, along with six other top executives on criminal conspiracy and money laundering charges related to alleged attempts to skirt state and local pay-to-play laws. Some of the activity took place in Bergen County, according to the indictment, which was handed up on Tuesday.

A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office said Tuesday that illegal donations of at least $686,000 went to both Democrats and Republicans, but declined to identify the recipients. The company’s donations and its failure to report them should have disqualified it from many of the government contracts it obtained, Chiesa said Tuesday.

Birdsall received more than $28 million in government contract payments throughout the state in 2011, including more than $3 million from Bergen and Passaic Counties, according to state records. Wuestneck said in court papers that the company had nearly $50 million in revenue in 2012.

On Friday, officials in Englewood said they were severing ties with Birsdsall after hiring the company on March 19 to perform environmental tests and studies on soil pollution beneath the Fire Department headquarters, the Public Works Department and a parking lot on Armory Street that the city used to own.

“We will find another company to do the work that they were going to do,” the city manager, Timothy Dacey, said in an email.

The company was to be paid $218,375 as the city’s licensed site remediation professional.

City Engineer Kenneth Albert said he sent Birdsall a letter of termination a day after the indictment. The city had not signed any contracts with the company, having hired them by resolution, and had yet to approve funding for the work.

Birdsall’s troubles surfaced last year when its former marketing director pleaded guilty for his role in the pay-to-play scheme. But Albert said he had no idea Birdsall was under investigation and recommended the company because it owned PMK Group, an environmental consulting firm that he said had performed well on past projects in Englewood.

Mayor Frank Huttle said he is opposed to Birdsall doing any further work in Englewood.

State authorities have said Birdsall officials hid illegal political contributions by having employees make donations of up to $300, the threshold for reporting contributions to state election officials. The company allegedly then illegally reimbursed those employees.

The Record reported in 2010 that Birdsall was one of at least six companies that contributed to the campaigns of three Democratic Bergen County freeholders who repeatedly voted in favor of awarding contracts to those companies. The contributions were legally reported, officials said at the time.

The three freeholders — James Carroll, Elizabeth Calabrese and John Hogan — all lost their seats in the November 2010 election. The Bergen County freeholders adopted an ordinance in 2011 that limits campaign contributions from contractors doing business with the county government.